OSS Watch team blog

Some time ago I posted “Does it take a disaster to understand the power of open development?” Unfortunately it is now time to revisit that post with a call for software developers to help Haiti.

The Sahana Software Foundation are looking for additional developers to help with Sahana, a disaster management tool. They need to continue to build an information portal that is seeing increased interest and usage to assist organisations responding to events in Haiti. Information on the work underway can be found on the Sahana Haiti response Overview page.

The skills they are primarily looking for are (you don’t need them all, any will do):

•  Python – the main development for SahanaPy is Python (we’re not using PHP for this instance)
•  web2py – Sahana uses the web2py enterprise framework for SahanaPy (I’m told it is fairly easy to learn if you’re used to Django)
•  OpenLayers
•  jQuery

To find out more and offer your help please jump onto #sahana on freenode. Please give as much or as little as you want.Some of the core devs have been working really long hours the past 5-6 days, and any additional resource would assist us greatly, particularly as the effort is really starting to get some interest, traction and coverage, which leads to more and more feature requests.

Thanks for reading this far – please consider giving a few hours of your time to help out, if you can.